s you please," said he. "If you think I
care...." And he went out.

And naturally enough, soon after, Barbro was wearing both her rings
again.

In time, too, she ceased to care at all for what he said about the
death of the child. She simply sniffed and tossed her head. Not that
she ever confessed anything, but only said: "Well, and suppose I had
drowned it? You live here in the wilds and what do you know of things
elsewhere?" Once when they were talking of this, she seemed to be
trying to get him to see he was taking it all too seriously; she
herself thought no more of getting rid of a child than the matter was
worth. She knew two girls in Bergen who had done it; but one of them
had got two months' imprisonment because she had been a fool and
hadn't killed it, but only left it out to freeze to death; and the
other had been acquitted. "No," said Barbro, "the law's not so cruel
hard now as it used to be. And besides, it's not always it gets found
out." There was a girl in Bergen at the hotel who had killed two
children; she was from Christiania, and wore a hat--a hat with
feathers in. They had given her three months for the second one, but
the first was never discovered, said Barbro.

Axel listened to all this and grew more than ever afraid of her. He
tried to understand, to make out things a little in the darkness, but
she was right after all; he took these things too seriously in his
way. With all her vulgar depravity, Barbro was not worth a single
earnest thought. Infanticide meant nothing to her, there was nothing
extraordinary in the killing of a child; she thought of it only
with the looseness and moral nastiness that was to be expected of a
servant-girl. It was plain, too, in the days that followed; never an
hour did she give herself up to thought; she was easy and natural as
ever, unalterably shallow and foolish, unalterably a servant-girl. "I
must go and have my teeth seen to," she said. "And I want one of those
new cloaks." There was a new kind of half-length coat that had been
fashionable for some years past, and Barbro must have one.

And when she took it all so naturally, what could Axel do but give
way? And it was not always that he had any real suspicion of her; she
herself had never confessed, had indeed denied time and again,
but without indignation, without insistence, as a trifle, as a
servant-girl would have denied having broken a dish, whether she had
done so or not. But after a couple of weeks,